My name is Graham and I have been in the slave trade as a slave and this world has been very scary. I have had people who I care very much be taken away from me and I have been separated from half of my family. I have been bought and sold from many of people do to the lack of workers in the new world. This all began when I was taken out of my country of Africa, and was put on a ship and then was not told where I was being taken. But then I was brought to this new world where I met some people who lived in what they call Cuba. They told me that these new men came into their country and took them and moved them off of their own land and then put them to work. They were very furious with these new men that came into their country due to the fact that they were forced into slavery on their own land. This led them to start fights and began to revolt. This also led me to find out from some of the natives that they had friends who started to die off and they have no idea why they were. But what we learned is that they were becoming sick and this led to them dying. They mistreated a lot of the natives and I saw it first hand when they brought me to the new world, when I was on the ship. They would beat a lot of people on the ship, we rarely got fed and then they started to throw a lot of people over board for no reason. I witnessed first-hand that people were being attacked by sharks when they were being thrown overboard and then they were being thrown into these rooms if they were not feeling well. They ended up getting more sick and dying in a few days. My friend was fine on the boat and then a few days later he eventually started to grow sores on his body and they snatched him away from us and threw into one of these rooms.

The year is 1863 and me and my family have been captured and taken from our village in the Whydah. We are very terrified and do not know what is going on or why we have been captured. All we know is that they are taking us on this huge ship along with the majority of our village and they are throwing us on this huge ship. They say we are being brought to a place to start a new life and to help and make money. What we did not know was that we were making money for the men that have taken us and selling us. They told us that the boat is named the Cicerón and that it is owned by Julián Zulueta and José Carreras. The voyage to the port that we are going to was very nerve-racking. For the months we were sailing, things happened that I had never seen. We come from a small village and I had never seen so many people in one place, especially in such a small space. There are more then 960 people on this ship, many of them coming from all over Africa to be sent to what we found out is the country of Cuba. The trip over was nothing that I had ever seen. My family and I were scared to death due to the fact that we did not know what was going to happen to us once we got off the ship and because we did not know what was going to happen to us while on the boat. While on the boat we became friends with some of the other passengers. But it was very difficult because one day our friends would be there and the next they would be gone. We have no idea where they went or why they were taken away. Some of the passengers were taken away because they started to develop these sores on their body and began to look sick. We had no idea what to do for them and one day they were taken away to another room. We saw them take some of our friends and tell them that they were going over board, or that they were going to be food for the sharks. We had no idea what they were talking about, but this frightened us to death not knowing what sharks were. Eventually, we got close to where we were landing and they were saying this will be our home for the rest of our lives.

“EXPLORE THE DISPERSAL OF ENSLAVED AFRICANS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC 

WORLD.” Slave Voyages, www.slavevoyages.org/.